Yet another blog (hopefully a useful one though)
MS Internet Magento Easy Pre-Installer

At MS Internet we are proud to use Magento as the base of the majority of our e-commerce projects. As a software Magento is very thoroughly built and provides a plethora or functions. The following is taken from the Magento site:
Marketing Promotions and Tools
- Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories.
- Catalog Promotional Pricing
Analytics and Reporting
- Admin Dashboard for Report Overview
- Abandoned Shopping Cart Report
- Best Customers Report by Total and Number of Orders
Search Engine Optimization
- Google Site Map
- URL Rewrites give full control of URL’s
- Meta-information for products and categories
Site Management
- Control multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel with ability to share as much or as little information as needed
- Web Services API for easy integration between Magento and any third-party application
- One-Click Upgrades
- Google Website Optimizer Integration for A/B and Multivariate Testing
Catalog Management
- Batch Import and Export of catalog
- Google Base Integration
- Downloadable/Digital Products
- Advanced Pricing Rules and support for Special Prices (see marketing tools)
Catalog Browsing
- Layered / Faceted Navigation for filtering of products in Categories
- Layered / Faceted Navigation for filtering of products in Search Results
- Product comparisons
- Product Reviews
Checkout
- One-Page Checkout
- Checkout without account/Guest Checkout
- Shipping to multiple addresses in one order
Shipping
- Shipping to multiple addresses in one order
- Multiple shipments per order
- Free Shipping
Payment
- Integrated with Google Checkout (Level 2)
- Payment Extensions Available through Magento Connect
- Configurable to authorize and charge, or authorize only and charge on creation of invoices
Customer Accounts
- Re-orders from account
- Downloadable Products
- Recently ordered items
Order Management
- View, edit, create and fulfill orders from admin panel.
- Create one or multiple invoices, shipments and credit memos per order to allow for split fulfillment
The downside of Magento is that it is a huge application with almost 10,000 files. This makes the task of installing the base software quiet time consuming. If you have SSH access this can be done much more quickly than via ftp but many hosts will not allow this. So, we have created this Magento Pre-Installer to get and unpack the files and install the sample data.
This zip file contains one PHP script. To run simply upload to your web root. If you provide database credentials you can also install the sample data. This script fetches Magento version 1.3.2.4.